PART Ⅰ-3

百度搜索 Coming up for Air 天涯 或 Coming up for Air 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.

    There was a bombing plane flying low overhead. For a minute or two it seemed to be keeping pace with the train. Two vulgar kind of blokes in shabby overcoats, obviously ercials of the lowest type, neer vassers probably, were sitting opposite me. One of them was reading the Mail and the other was reading the Express. I could see by their mahat they’d spotted me for one of their kind. Up at the other end of the carriage two lawyers’ clerks with black bags were keeping up a versation full of legal balohat was meant to impress the rest of us and show that they didn’t belong to the on herd.

    I was watg the backs of the houses sliding past. The line from West Bletchley runs most of the way through slums, but it’s kind of peaceful, the glimpses y<cite></cite>ou get of little backyards with bits of flowers stu boxes and the flat roofs where the women peg out the washing and the bird-cage on the wall. The great blabing plane swayed a little in the air and zoomed ahead so that I couldn’t see it. I was sitting with my back to the engine. One of the ercials cocked his eye at it for just a sed. I knew what he was thinking. For that matter it’s what everybody else is thinking. You don’t have to be a highbrow to think such thoughts nowadays. In two years’ time, one year’s time, what shall we be doing when we see one of those things? Making a dive for the cellar, wetting s with fright.

    The ercial bloke put down his Daily Mail.

    ‘Templegate’s winner e in,’ he said.

    The lawyers’ clerks were sprouting some learned rot about fee- simple and peppers. The other ercial felt in his waistcoat poc藏书网ket and took out a bent Woodbine. He felt iher pocket and then leaned across to me.

    ‘Got a match, Tubby?’

    I felt for my matches. ‘Tubby’, you notice. That’s iing, really. For about a couple of minutes I stopped thinking about bombs and began thinking about my figure as I’d studied it in my bath that m.

    It’s quite true I’m tubby, in fact my upper half is almost exactly the shape of a tub. But what’s iing, I think, is that merely because you happen to be a little bit fat, almost anyone, even a total, stranger, will take it frao give you a niame that’s an insulting ent on your personal appearance. Suppose a chap was a hunchback or had a squint or a hare-lip—would you give him a niame to remind him of it? But every fat man’s labelled as a matter of course. I’m the type that people automatically slap on the bad pun the ribs, and nearly all of them think I like it. I never go into the saloon bar of the  at Pudley (I pass that way once a week on business) without that ass Waters, who travels for the Seafoam Soap people but who’s more or less a permanen the saloon bar of the , prodding me in the ribs and singing out ‘Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling!’ which is a joke the bloody fools in the bar never get tired of. Waters has got a finger like a bar of iron. They all think a fat ma have any feelings.

    The ercial took another of my matches, to pick his teeth with, and chucked the box back. The train whizzed on to an ire. Down below I got a glimpse of a baker’s van and a long string of lorries loaded with t. The queer thing, I was thinking, is that in a way they’re right about fat men. It’s a fact that a fat man, particularly a man who’s been fat from birth—from childhood, that’s to say—isn’t quite like other men. He goes through his life on a different plane, a sort of light-edy plahough in the case of blokes in side-shows at fairs, or in fayone over twenty sto isn’t so much light edy as low farce. I’ve been both fat and thin in my life, and I know the differeness makes to your outlook. It kind of prevents you from taking things too hard. I doubt whether a man who’s never been anything but fat, a man who’s been called Fatty ever since he could walk, even knows of the existence <bdi></bdi>of any really deep emotions. How could he? He’s got no experience of such things. He ’t ever be present at a tragic se, because a se where there’s a fat ma isn’t tragic, it’s ic. Just imagine a fat Hamlet, for instance! Or Oliver Hardy ag Romeo. Funnily enough I’d been thinking something of the kind only a few days earlier when I was reading a novel I’d got out of Boots. Wasted Passion, it was called. The chap iory finds out that his girl has gone off with another chap. He’s one of these chaps you read about in novels, that have pale sensitive faces and dark hair and a private ine. I remember more or less how the passage went:

    David paced up and down the room, his hands pressed to his forehead. The news seemed to have stunned him. For a long time he could not believe it. Sheila uo him! It could not be! Suddenly realization rushed over him, and he saw the fa all its stark horror. It was too much. He flung himself down in a paroxysm of weeping.

    Anyway, it went something like that. And even at the time it started me thinking. There you have it, you see. That’s how people—some people—are expected to behave. But how about a chap like me? Suppose Hilda went off for a week-end with somebody else- -not that I’d care a damn, in fact it would rather please me to find that she’d still got that much kick left in her—but suppose I did care, would I fling myself down in a paroxysm of weeping? Would anyone expect me to? You couldn’t, with a figure like mi would be dht obse.

    The train was runnbbr>.９９lｉb.</abbr>ing along an emba. A little below us you could see the roofs of the houses stretg on and on, the little red roofs where the bombs are going to drop, a bit lighted up at this moment because a ray of sunshine was catg them. Funny how we keep on thinking about bombs. Of course there’s no question that it’s ing soon. You  tell how close it is by the cheer- up stuff they’re talking about it in the neer. I was reading a pie the News icle the other day where it said that bombing planes ’t do any damage nowadays. The anti-aircraft guns have got so good that the bomber has to stay at twenty thousa. The chap thinks, you notice, that if an aeroplane’s high enough the bombs don’t reach the ground. Or more likely what he really meant was that they’ll miss Woolwich Arsenal and only hit places like Ellesmere Road.

    But taking it by and large, I thought, it’s not so bad to be fat. Ohing about a fat man is that he’s alopular. There’s really no kind of pany, from bookies to bishops, where a fat ma fit in and feel at home. As for women, fat men have more luck with them than people seem to think. It’s all bunk to imagine, as some people do, that a woman looks on a fat man as just a joke. The truth is that a woma look on ANY man as a joke if he  kid her that he’s in love with her.

    Mind you, I haven’t always been fat. I’ve been fat fht or nine years, and I suppose I’ve developed most of the characteristics. But it’s also a fact that internally, mentally, I’m not altogether fat. No! Don’t mistake me. I’m n to put myself over as a kind of tender flower, the ag heart behind the smiling fad so forth. You couldn’t get on in the insurance business if you were anything like that. I’m vulgar, I’m iive, and I fit in with my enviro. So long as anywhere in the world things are being sold on ission and livings are picked up by sheer brass and lack of finer feelings, chaps like me will be doing it. In almost all circumstances I’d mao make a living—always a living and never a fortune—and even in war, revolution, plague, and famine I’d back myself to stay alive lohan most people. I’m that type. But also I’ve got something else inside me, chiefly a hangover from the past. I’ll tell you about that later. I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

    The chap who’d borrowed my matches was having a good pick at his teeth over the Express.

    ‘Legs case don’t seem to get much forrader,’ he said.

    ‘They’ll never get ‘im,’ said the other. ‘‘Ow could you identify a pair of legs? They’re all the bleeding same, aren’t they?’

    ‘Might trace ‘im through the piece of paper ‘e ed ‘em up in,’ said the first.

    Down below you could see the roofs of the houses stretg on and on, twisting this way and that with the streets, but stretg on and on, like an enormous plain that you could have ridden over. Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost without a break. Christ! how  the bombers miss us when they e? We’re just one great big bull’s-eye. And n, probably. Because who’s going to be such a bloody fool as to declare war nowadays? If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the middle of a disarmament ference. Some quiet m, when the clerks are streaming across Londe, and the ary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the bloomers on the line—zoom, whizz, plonk! Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, ary singing on above the corpses.

    Seems a pity somehow, I thought. I looked at the great sea of roofs stretg on and on. Miles and miles of streets, fried-fish shops, tin chapels, picture houses, little printing-shops up back alleys, factories, blocks of flats, whelk stalls, dairies, power stations—on and on and on. Enormous! And the peacefulness of it! Like a great wilderness with no wild beasts. No guns firing, nobody chug pineapples, nobody beating anybody else up with a rubber trun. If you e to think of it, in the whole of England at this moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from whiyone’s firing a mae-gun.

    But how about five years from now? Or two years? Or one year?

百度搜索 Coming up for Air 天涯 或 Coming up for Air 天涯在线书库 即可找到本书最新章节.